Cole Swensen is the author of twelve volumes of poetry, most recently Ours (University of California Press, 2008) and THE GLASS AGE (Alice James Books, 2007). Her 2004 title, GOEST, was a finalist for the National Book Award; other volumes have won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, Sun and Moon's New American Writing Award, and the National Poetry Series. She is the co-editor with David St. John of the recent Norton anthology American Hybrid . A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, she has also received grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Shifting Foundation, and the Camargo Foundation and has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. She is also a translator of contemporary French poetry, prose, and art criticism; her translation of Jean Fremon's ISLAND OF THE DEAD won the 2004 PEN USA Award for Literary Translation, and she has received translation grants from the Association Beaumarchais and French Centre du Livre. She is the founder and editor of La Presse, a small press dedicated to experimental French poetry translated by English-language poets, and the co-director of the annual Reid Hall Translation Seminar in Paris. She was the writer-in-residence at Yale's Beinecke Library in 2007-2008, where the project GREENSWARD was conceived and written.

She has served as a visiting writer at Brown University and Grinnell College, and is on the permanent faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.